Non-Stop

Friday

Jun 27, 2014 at 2:00 AM

Make sure your carry-ons are stowed safely in the bin above or the seat in front of you.

John Walker

Make sure your carry-ons are stowed safely in the bin above or the seat in front of you. Put your seats in the upright position, buckle your seatbelts, turn your brain off and prepare for take off with Liam Neeson’s latest action thriller, Non-Stop.

In the tradition of Flight Plan and Red Eye comes Non-Stop, a thriller about an air marshal who must find a passenger who is sending him mysterious texts. The killer threatens to murder a fellow passenger every 20 minutes unless $150 million is wired to a secret account.

To say too much about the plot would be to ruin some of the surprises and fun of the film, so I won’t go into detail here. I’ll just say that Neeson stars as an alcoholic former cop turned air marshal who really doesn’t care for flying. He gives a strong performance in a role he is coming to perfect and lends a strong credibility to an otherwise silly premise.

If you liked Taken, Taken 2 or Unknown, then you’re sure to love Neeson’s latest suspense-thriller. Non-Stop is a pure entertainment action movie. If you think too hard about the plot you’ll see it doesn’t make much sense, but the beauty of the film is that it moves at such a quick pace you really don’t have time to think about it.

Non-Stop adds nothing new to the action/thriller genre but is an entertaining action film just the same. Not being a huge fan of the Taken franchise I was genuinely surprised to really enjoy this film. If you’re in the mood to escape the summer re-runs that make up the majority of television, check out Non-Stop.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Filmmaker Wes Anderson’s latest is pure Wes Anderson. It is full of quirky yet soulful characters and dialog to match, old-school film-making style using matte paintings and stop-motion photography, and an anal retentive attention to detail.

The film follows the adventures of Gustave H, a legendary concierge at the Grand Budapest Hotel. Ralph Fiennes is Gustave H, with the rest of the cast being rounded out by such Anderson alums as Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Owen Wilson, Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe. Gustave is charged with the murder of a rich heiress after he inherits a valuable painting and must race to prove his innocence.

Anderson tries to bring a realism to the fantastical world he creates while at the same time leaving viewers with the feeling that they just saw a story book come to life. From Rushmore to Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson has been getting better and better and his latest film is no exception. For me, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a good Anderson film with moments of brilliance, but it would not be among my top three Anderson films.

Is Wes Anderson for everyone? No. He has a storytelling style that you’re either going to love or just not get that into. Criticism of Anderson’s work is that is self-indulgent, takes forever and goes nowhere and of Anderson himself that he is an overrated director. I am a huge fan of Anderson’s work yet feel these criticisms are indeed valid.

Devoted fans will make you feel stupid when they talk of how fantastic and beloved his films are to them. My advice to someone talking to a big fan of Wes Anderson’s work is that if you don’t like his films just pretend you never saw them. Telling a big Wes Anderson fan you don’t care for his films is like trying to convert the Taliban to Scientology. You’re probably going to get shouts of angry disbelief followed by the feeling that you’re about to be beheaded.

To be honest, I really enjoy and appreciate Anderson’s films, my favorite being his, Bottle Rocket, followed by The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, yet I find him over-rated. I think he is one of the most imaginative and talented filmmakers working today and look forward to what he is going to do next, but I have yet to be blown away by one of his films.

I feel that when Wes Anderson was in elementary school he made the most amazing and immersive dioramas for his school project with moving parts and flashing lights that the teacher loved so much she begged to keep it to show future classes. Meanwhile the rest of us sat with our mother’s old shoe box filled with badly glued plastic army men and grass we pulled out of our front lawn, wishing we had spent more time on our project and secretly hating little old Wes.

Now that little old Wes is grown up his dioramas are films and are very creative and imaginative; they sometimes make you laugh out loud and sometimes make you feel that you are listening to an old man amusingly set up a hilarious joke – yet the punch line never arrives.

I enjoyed The Grand Budapest Hotel and would highly recommend it to any Wes Anderson fan that didn’t get a chance to catch it in the theater. It may not be your favorite, but you’ll definitely enjoy it. If you’re not a huge fan or never really got into any of his previous films, I’d still give it a shot. It’s definitely better than watching re-runs of Shark Tank.